Courtesy photo. Nick Fagnano, of Los Angeles poses on the baseball field at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks with his parents, Mary and Jay Fagnano and his grandmother. Fagnano, 20, was killed Sunday after lightning struck while he was in the water at Venice Beach.

LOS ANGELES >> The parents of Notre Dame High School graduate Nick Fagnano confirmed Monday morning that their son was killed after lightning struck while he was in the water at Venice Beach.

Fagnano, an only child, was a 2012 graduate of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks and had also attended Santa Barbara City College and Santa Monica City College. He had been living with his parents in downtown Los Angeles since December and was about to enter USC as a junior, where he was planning on studying urban development, his parents said.

Fagnano had been sitting on the beach with two friends Sunday afternoon when he decided to go into the water and rinse off, mother Mary Fagnano said. It was then that lightning struck.

“There was so much commotion when the lightning struck on the beach, he was not one of those recovered in the first response,” she said in a phone interview. “His friends were looking frantically for him, couldn’t find him. Half an hour after lightning struck, his body was found about 50 feet out.”

Mary Fagnano said she and her husband, Jay Fagnano, pray that their son didn’t feel anything when the lightning struck.

“He was the best child a parent could ever had hoped for,” Mary Fagnano said, adding their son never gave them “one thing to worry about.”

Fagnano, who dreamed of being involved in the urban development of downtown Los Angeles, played baseball all four years at Notre Dame High School.

“The three most important things to Nick growing up were his faith, his family and his friends -- and then USC was the fourth to that,” his mother said. “It was something he worked so hard for. We were so proud of him that he had achieved that.”